NORTON Corrupted my WinXP Pro, Cant Reinstall/Repair!

For the fourth weekend in a row, either due to spyware, adware, and now Norton, my families PC's are driving me nuts and I am losing sleep!

Now, its a new gaming PC I built for my son two weeks ago. At first, it ran great then something went wrong in NORTON SystemPro 2003 and I tried to uninstall. NO luck and now I couldn't reinstall or uninstall what was left. Then Windows XP Pro wouldn't turn off the PC and it appeared corrupted in other ways.

After several days off, I got back on it Wednesay and right now I am about to shoot the thing!!!

The rig has the following: ABIT NF7-S MB; ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB VC; two (2) MAXTOR 160GB HD; 2-512MB HyperX PC3500 Ram; Cendyne CDRW; Mad Dog DVDRW; Thermaltake 420W PS,; and a bunch of other high quality components that all worked!

I have tried to reinstall Windows XP several times and different ways. What I fear is that either Norton or a virus has forced fed something onto both Maxtor 160GB hard drives that is preventing me from reinstalling Windows XP - OR - something I am not aware of.

* I have tried the Recovery Console but that wont work replacing the usual files.
* I have tried to reformat using a Windows Me Boot Disk - no go.
* I have tried to reformat using the Maxtor stuff and it wont work.
* When I try to reinstall WinXP, it gets to the one point and reboots - and NOW I GET A BLUE SCREEN that says something I have never read before:

"STOP: C0000221 Unknown Hard Error
\systemRoot\system32\ntdll.dll"

And that (ntdll.dll) was one of the files I then tried to reinstall from the Windows CD - which did copy by the way...

What I want to do is reformat the hard drives and reinstall - HOW can I do this if Norton or whatever has something still on them that prevents me from doing so???

CAN anyone assist me in this before I go over the edge and either eat myself into a heart attack, lose my job because I fall asleep there, or just plain go nuts!!!

Thank you all in advance!

FOLLOWUP:

A couple of items of Note:

1. When I get to setup for Windows, it says I have 131072 MB Disk (it is supposed to be 160Gig) and when I say to either partition or delete, it comes back and says there is ALSO a, "C: Partition1 [New Raw] 131070"

AND

"Unpartitioned space of 1 MB"

I cannot get rid of that 1 MB of Unpartitioned space and I have tried a number of times and ways tonight!

Second, when I do try the Install of Windows XP, and it reboots, I get the message "Cannot laod OS" or something similar - I am tired and forgot to write it down...

Does the above create some thoughts out there???

Do you happen to have an Iomega Zip drive on the same IDE cable as one of the HDD's? Also, check in the BIOS under "Standard CMOS Features Setup Menu"-->"Primary Master" and "Primary Slave" (assuming the two Maxtors are sharing the same IDE controller)-->"Access Mode". Change the "Access Mode" from "Auto" to "LBA" (Logical Block Addressing) mode on both drives.

It was long night, followed by a long afternoon BUT it is fixed and I have set it up and it works!

Between here and another site - and new friend "CaptnKirk" - I have been able to get it done and will do a writeup of our findings and what we did to correct.

Thanks for your assistance and consideration. I keep forgeting that there are good people on the Net who like to help others like myself. Bless you all!!!

funny I have had more than a couple of my friends tell me that Nortons had stopped working or that it was screwing up there system. And for some reason the last two I formated and reinstalled windows on my computer Norton Internet Secuirty 2003 will not install correctly. Anyone know why this is? I would hate to say that Norton's quality is going down the drain.

I receieved a lot of help from some people via PM and will be summarizing what the issues were, what I did to attempt to correct, and what the results were - soon.

Needless to say, it was a Norton issue.

WHat happened was during a LiveUPdate, something went wrong and Norton needed to be uninstalled, and then reinstalled - and that is where it all came tumbling down!

It would not completely uninstall and left residual pieces that just plain mucked it ALL up. The sad part was, it happened to two of our PCs within 24 hours of each other and I still have one more to fix - but it will be A LOT easier this time!

More later - this was Norton SystemWorks 2003 OEM by the way.